HOUSTON, Texas – They’ve hovered around the .500 mark, been in the middle of the pack, chugged along, quietly going about the hard work of fixing problems, gutting through injuries, and bolstering weak spots.
Generally winning by thin margins with low scores, they haven’t been a team to make opposing goalies quake. But they lose by even thinner margins, with 7 of their 10 losses coming by only one goal. Which is to say, they are relentlessly competitive, even when they are out-skilled.
And at least offensively, they are often out-skilled. Their top scorer, Jean-Michael Daoust, is a rather deep 85th in the league in points at 14 (5 goals). Jon DiSalvatore is the only other Aero cracking the top 100 with 3 goals and 11 assists.
In total contrast to last season‘s rollercoaster team, they are consistent. Every night, they grind out a disciplined, hardnosed game with an emphasis on defense, but plenty of freedom to create offensive chances, which they do in spades.
It’s just that, apart from a three-game stretch in early November where they outscored opponents 15-3, those chances almost never go in the net.
“We’ve got to get results there. Guys have got to finish the job,” said coach Kevin Constantine. “That’s a point of hockey where, for me, you hand that over to the players. I can’t coach, and we wouldn’t want to try to coach, ‘Hey, you’ve got a 2 on 1. What exactly are you going to try to do?’ We leave that to give the players some offensive freedom when they get their scoring chances.”
Injuries with the parent club Minnesota Wild have hamstrung the Aeros offense even further. Robbie Earl was leading the team in scoring when he was called up to the Wild for several weeks, and others like Danny Irmen, Nathan Smith, and Jaime Sifers have had more brief stints with the club.
And longer term injuries in Houston have also put a dent in the playable roster, as Cody Almond, JP Testwuide, and Andy Hilbert have been out for long stretches and have yet to return.
Natural defensemen Brandon Rogers and Jamie Fraser have both spent considerable time playing forward to bridge the gaps, and off-season Aeros signee Brandon Buck, who had been assigned to ECHL Florida during training camp, was recalled to help out.
For a long stretch, every healthy body was on the ice every night, with many of those bodies not all that healthy, Constantine calling it, “All hands on deck.”
But a trickle of healthy bodies in Minnesota and Houston has started to return rosters at both ends of the organization closer to what was envisioned at the start of the season.
In contrast to most of the rest of the team, one position that actually has been a little flashier and quite stable is in goal. Anton Khudobin quickly earned the #1 spot and has stats that put him second in the league with a 9-4-1 record and a trim 1.59 GAA and 0.934 save percentage. Further, Khudobin earned his fourth shutout of the year on the road against Hamilton last week.
Behind him, Wade Dubielewicz, who came into the organization expecting to back up Niklas Backstrom in Minnesota and is now backing up Khudobin in Houston, has done nothing but improve as the season has progressed.
In spite of a 1-3-0 record in November, he sports a stingy 1.60 GAA and 0.932 save percentage for the same period, which in general points to the Aeros inability to provide goal support.
The Aeros enter December on an uptick having finished a three-game road trip earning 5 of a possible 6 standings points available to them. And they face a relatively painless December schedule, as most of it will be spent on home ice.
This week, the team will play a home-and-home series with San Antonio, starting in Houston with a rare weekday game on Thursday morning in front of thousands of Houston-area school children.
Other notes:
The Aeros finally ended a stretch of 45 power play opportunities without scoring a goal. Since then, they’re slowly climbing out of the basement and ranked 24th in the league on the power play.
The penalty kill, on the other hand, is second in the league, having allowed only 6 power play goals in 24 games.
The team currently sits alone in second place in the West Division, but only 7th in the Western Conference. The North Division is deep with teams that are dominating the league in the first quarter of the season.
Finally healthy after nearly 9 months of repeated false starts on a fractured foot, Barry Brust has returned to playing, but still has yet to play a game in an Aeros uniform since last April. He was assigned instead to ECHL Florida to get playing time and conditioning. He’s currently 3-1-0-1 with the Everblades, and no indication of the length of his assignment to Florida has been provided by either team.
Contact heather.galindo@prohockeynews.com
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